Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler

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Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler names' given by Adam at the Creation). Words were seen as the names of things rather than as representations. As Michel Foucault (1926-84) has shown, only in the early modern period did scholars come to see words and other signifiers as representations which were subject to conventions rather than as copies (Foucault 1970). By the seventeenth century clear distinctions were being made between representations (signifiers), ideas (signifieds) and things (referents). Scholars now regarded signifiers as referring to ideas rather than directly to things. Representations were conventionalized constructions which were relatively independent both of what they represented and of their authors; knowledge involved manipulating such signs. Olson notes that once such distinctions are made, the way is open to making modality judgements about the status of representations - such as their perceived truth or accuracy (Olson 1994, 68-78, 165-168, 279-280). Whilst the seventeenth century shift in attitudes towards signs was part of a search for 'neutrality', 'objectivity' and 'truth', in more recent times, of course, we have come to recognize that 'there is no representation without intention and interpretation' (Olson 1994, 197). It is said that someone once asked an astronomer how he had discovered the name of a previously unknown star! Sophisticated literates are able to joke about the notion that names 'belong' to things. In one of Aldous Huxley's novels an old farmworker points out his pigs: '"Look at them, sir,' he said, with a motion of his hand towards the wallowing swine. 'Rightly is they called pigs' (Chrome Yellow, Chapter 5). Literate adults may not often seem to be prey to this sort of nominal realism. However, certain signifiers become regarded by some as far from 'arbitrary', acquiring almost magical power - as in relation to 'graphic' swearing and issues of prejudice - highlighting the point that signifiers are not socially arbitrary. Children are just as aware of this: many are far from convinced by adult advice that 'sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can never hurt me'. By adding his own label to an advertisement, Thomas Streeter at the University of Vermont alerts us to the way in which referents can be redefined by the skilful use of verbal anchors. So reminding ourselves that 'the word is not the thing' may be more useful than it might at first seem to be. The literary theorist Catherine Belsey argues that Language is experienced as a nomenclature because its existence precedes our "understanding" of the world. Words seem to be symbols for things because things are inconceivable outside the system of differences which constitutes the language. Similarly, these very things seem to be represented in the mind, in an autonomous realm of thought, because thought is in essence symbolic, dependent on the differences brought about by the symbolic order. And so language is 'overlooked', suppressed in favour of a quest for meaning in experience and/or in the mind. The world of things and subjectivity then become the twin guarantors of truth. (Belsey 1980, 46) Hamlet refers to: 'the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature' (Shakespeare, Hamlet, III, ii), and being 'true-to-life' is probably still a key criterion in judgements of literary worth. However, Belsey comments:
Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler The claim that a literary form reflects the world is simply tautological. If by 'the world' we understand the world we experience, the world differentiated by language, then the claim that realism reflects the world means that realism reflects the world constructed in language. This is a tautology. If discourses articulate concepts through a system of signs which signify by means of their relationship to each other rather than to entities in the world, and if literature is a signifying practice, all it can reflect is the order inscribed in particular discourses, not the nature of the world. (ibid.) The medium of language comes to acquire the illusion of 'transparency': this feature of the medium tends to blind its users to the part it plays in constructing their experiential worlds. 'Realistic' texts reflect a mimetic purpose in representation - seeking to imitate so closely that which they depict that they may be experienced as virtually identical (and thus unmediated). Obviously, purely verbal signifiers cannot be mistaken for their real world referents. Whilst it is relatively easy for us to regard words as conventional symbols, it is more difficult to recognize the conventionality of images which resemble their signifieds. Yet even an image is not what it represents - the presence of an image marks the absence of its referent. The difference between signifier and signified is fundamental. Nevertheless, when the signifiers are experienced as highly 'realistic' - as in the case of photography and film - it is particularly easy to slip into regarding them as identical with their signifieds. In contrast even to realistic painting and drawing, photographs seem far less obviously 'authored' by a human being. Just as 'the word is not the thing' and 'the map is not the territory' nor is a photograph or television news footage that which it depicts. Yet in the 'commonsense' attitude of everyday life we routinely treat high modality signifiers in this way. Indeed, many realistic filmic narratives and documentaries seem to invite this confusion of representation with reality (Nichols 1981, 21). Thus television is frequently described as a 'window on the world' and we usually assume that 'the camera never lies'. We know of course that 'the dog in the film can bark but it cannot bite' (Hall 1980, 131) (though, when 'absorbed', we may 'suspend disbelief' in the context of what we know to be enacted drama). However, we are frequently inclined to accept 'the evidence of our own eyes' even when events are mediated by the cameras of journalists. Highly 'realistic' representations in any medium always involve a point-of-view. Representations which claim to be 'real' deny the unavoidable difference between map and territory. Lewis Carroll satirized the logical consequences of neglecting the importance of this difference: 'That's another thing we've learned from your Nation,' said Mein Herr, 'map-making. But we've carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?' 'About six inches to the mile.' 'Only six inches!' exclaimed Mein Herr. 'We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile' 'Have you used it much?' I enquired. 'It has never been spread out, yet,' said Mein Herr: 'the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own
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